Texas Flu Death Puts U.S. Total At 5

Corpus Christi Man Falls Victim To H1N1 Virus; 3 More NYC Schools Closed

(CBS/AP)  A 33-year-old Corpus Christi man died earlier this month from the H1N1 virus, Texas health officials said Friday. The latest victim is the third fatality in Texas and apparently the fifth in the country.

Corpus Christi-Nueces County Health District's Dr. William Burgin Jr. said Friday that the man died May 5 or May 6 after becoming sick a few days earlier. He said the man had preexisting medical conditions, including heart problems, that made it more difficult for him to survive any viral illness.

Burgin did not identify the man but said he was a single parent of three children. He says one of the children contracted swine flu but was treated and is recovering.

Burgin says county health officials received confirmation Friday morning that the man had died of swine flu.

On Thursday, an Arizona woman suffering from a lung condition apparently became the fourth person with swine flu in the nation to die, authorities said. The Maricopa County Health Department reported that the woman in her late 40s died last week of what appears to be complications of the new strain of influenza.

Meanwhile, health investigators are trying to figure out why swine flu has spread erratically - moving quickly through a few schools but slowly elsewhere - after an outbreak closed three more New York schools on Thursday. On Friday, a city official said that three additional schools would be closed in Queens and Brooklyn. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the shut-down has not been announced.

The decision on Thursday to shutter the schools follows an outbreak that left an assistant principal in critical condition and sent hundreds of kids home with flu symptoms, in a flare-up of the virus that sent shock waves through the world last month.

Schools are a good incubator for illness in general because space is tight and youngsters often don't practice the best hygiene, said Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a deputy commissioner of the health department.

Across the country, most of the people getting the illness have been young. Some experts have speculated that older people might have some immunity to the virus because of genetic similarities to more common types of flu.

"We're trying to answer some of those questions," Weisfuse said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said four students and the assistant principal have documented cases of swine flu at a Queens middle school. More than 50 students have gone home sick with flu-like symptoms, he said. At another middle school in Queens, 241 students were absent Thursday. Dozens more were sick at an elementary school.

The Health Department said the assistant principal from the Susan B. Anthony middle school is on a ventilator, marking the most severe illness in the city from swine flu to date. The students who have fallen ill in this latest surge of illness appear to be experiencing mild symptoms, similar to routine flu.

The assistant principal, identified by colleagues as Mitch Weiner, may have had pre-existing health problems, the mayor said. In many other swine flu cases that turned critical, patients had pre-existing conditions.

Adam Wiener, the patient's son, has disputed the reports that his father has been suffering from pre-existing medical conditions. He says the only condition his father had before was gout.

He said his father is now suffering from kidney failure and a lung infection after being hospitalized with swine flu since early Wednesday.

The 23-year-old Adam Wiener has been keeping a vigil at the hospital with his mother and younger twin brothers.

Eighteen-year-old son Jordan said his dad was awake briefly and asked him about an earlier baseball injury.

Bloomberg said that three schools - with more than 4,000 students altogether - would be closed for at least a week because "there are an unusually high level of flu-like illnesses at those schools."

"There are documented cases of H1N1 flu at one of them," the mayor said, using the formal name for swine flu.

New York City's first known cases of swine flu appeared in late April, when hundreds of teenagers at a Roman Catholic high school in Queens began falling ill following the return of several students from vacations in Mexico, where the outbreak began.

At first, the virus appeared to be moving at breakneck speed. An estimated 1,000 students, their relatives and staff at the St. Francis Preparatory School fell ill in a matter of days. A limited number of kids had confirmed cases of swine flu because the Health Department tested only a small amount of students.

City health officials became aware of the outbreak on April 24. The school closed and health officials began bracing for more illnesses throughout the city.

But the outbreak then seemed to subside. Additional sporadic cases continued to be diagnosed, but the symptoms were nearly all mild. The sick children recovered in short order. St. Francis reopened after being closed for a week.

The middle school with the confirmed cases is two miles from St. Francis.

People at the school said students started going home sick on Tuesday and Wednesday, alarming parents.

"I'm worried," said Dino Dilchande, whose sixth-grade son goes to the school. "The city should have taken more precautions. We should have been notified earlier."

At the Susan B. Anthony, administrators posted a sign on the door from the Health Department informing students and teachers that the school would be closed for a week. The school is in the Hollis section of Queens, a neighborhood known for producing several rappers including the group Run-DMC.

A knock on the door of an address for a Mitch Weiner in the neighborhood of the school went unanswered.

At the start of the flu outbreak in the United States, government health officials recommended that schools shut down for two weeks if there were students with swine flu. But when the virus turned out to be milder than initially feared, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped that advice but urged parents to keep children with flu symptoms home for a week.

Vaccine experts brought together by the World Health Organization Thursday have not yet decided whether to issue the go-ahead for wide-scale production of an H1N1 vaccine. Earlier in the week, a WHO medical officer said that 10 percent of people infected with the strain had to be hospitalized, which is far more than seen in the seasonal flu, reports CBS News correspondent Bianca Solorzano.

So far, the virus has not proved to be more infectious or deadly than the seasonal flu.

CDC officials said schools may decide to close if there is a cluster that's affecting attendance and staffing.

[justsane-2009]

five, count 'em 5 people have died in the us from this 'pandemic' since the beginning of the 'outbreak.' can we move on to something really scary? like the number of lives that have been lost to gun violence during the same time period? or the number of babies who died prematurely because their mothers has no health insurance? there are so many things to be more concerned about...

[armyoftwelve]

And look out for those Worms of Mass Diahhrea
:)

[armyoftwelve]

Maybe we should invade Mexico and round up all the elements of "Swine Queda"

LOL

[clancy49]

5 people die across America from complications with the flu and it is newsworthy. Keep in mind that what you don't think about is far more dangerous to you and the greatest killer is the smallest one, like the bite of an infected flea. Not too many years ago several hundred people died in one single city, Milwaukee. The cause? A bacteria known as crypto spirodium. Why? The water and sewer infrastructure of Milwaukee was so old and need of repair the leaks contaminated the drinking water. Do any of you think it is only Milwaukee that has this problem. The oldest and largest cities in America have this problem. New York is dealing with infrastructures that are more than a centure old, some are two centuries old. Yet population increases in the big cities putting more and more stress on these old water and sewer infrastructures. Is there any money to fix it? No! When the cities try to increase prices to fix it, the population goes nuts. We pay $2.50 a gallon for gas and up to $5.00 per gallon, but pay only an average of $2.40 per 1,000 gallons of water. We panic over flu. We panic over terrorists. We allow our government to spend billions on pharmaceutical research, war, and torture, but do not demand that our government spend money on the things that can really kill an entire population. Think about it. Think about what happens every time you flush that toilet with your excrements, the path it travels, where it goes, and where it finally ends up. Imagine your city flooded with that sewer mess. Just ask anyone in a flood or hurricane aftermath. Ask what danger there is in that tiny little bug we don't think about.

[albert571]

IDIOT!

[searingtruth]

"Those tragedies, not visited upon us or our children, are often considered lesser than those that have."
SearingTruth

A Future of the Brave

[albert571]

Searingtruth your screen name should be Streachingtruth, I have this weird (sick)feeling in the pit of my stomach that you are indeed Obama and are trying to either spy on everyone or just trying to see how many mentally disturbed people buy into your Dreams!

[searingtruth]

"And 'm working on a more user friendly explanation of why we should be unusually afraid of this virus ... :)
ST
I'll watch for it :-)"
Posted by IrishWench01 at 5:56 PM : May 15, 2009


Here it is, and I hope it will help most to understand.
ST


"Fellow citizens,

We are being attacked by a uniquely constructed virus that our immune system does not recognize, and therefore has no defense against. Our immune system is our bodies defense against all disease, and if it can't recognize an illness then it can't attack it.

The virus we face, H1N1, sometimes called the swine flu, is a previously unknown combination of swine (pig), Avian (bird), and human virus that has thus far produced only mild symptoms in humans. Our immune system doesn't recognize it because it has pig and bird components that throw off our immune defenses, which are designed to detect only virus and bacteria with human components. In effect, bird and pig components in a virus act as an "umbrella" that keeps our bodies from seeing them.

But while easy to catch because we have no defense against it, the reason this virus has only caused mild illness so far is because the "payload" (the toxins it produces) are much the same as any other seasonal flu. And so long as it doesn't change we will be fine.

But a virus is inherently unstable, and can mutate (change) incalculable times dependent upon its structure and environment, in only a few days. Changing their payloads lethality like a slot machine, but in this case, one in which we hope will never hit a jackpot.

You see, virus are not actual life as we normally know it, but instead exist outside of living cells as usually single, and sometimes double, strands of something called "RNA".

And RNA is a very interesting and critical substance. Because in normal cells, DNA is transcribed (think of it as translated) to RNA, and RNA is synthesized (actually made) into proteins (the actual product of the cell), often to replicate the cell itself. Things can be more complicated than this, and there can be multiple levels of RNA decoding, but this is the basic mechanism for protein production and cell reproduction. But no matter what steps involved in a cells normal transcription and synthesis processes, it is heavily protected by many levels of "error correction".

This changes when a virus infects a cell. When a virus infects a cell it inserts its RNA into the cells DNA, causing it to produce more copies of the virus itself. However, the insertion of relatively small strands of RNA into complicated strands of DNA almost always lead to "side effects", which make it difficult for the virus to replicate without error. And some virus don't even use a host cells DNA for reproduction, some replicate by RNA alone, which leads to even more replication error.

And these errors are what we know as mutations, which can lead to a virus changing to become completely benign, or globally lethal, or something in between. This is how a virus such as H1N1, which produced relatively mild illness in one flu season, can become globally lethal in another. As did the Spanish flu virus.

But there is even one more caveat of concern here. The H1N1 virus likes to gather RNA from other cells or virus, which only compounds the probability of so many varied mutations that a lethal one is at least minimally probable.

Therefore we must be vigilant and prepared. The warnings of many, including myself, to implement social distancing were not headed, so the spread of H1N1 continues unabated and has now spread into territories where H5N1 (the avian flu with a 60% mortality rate) is widespread, which offers both virus an excellent opportunity to combine and experiment with mutations until they become lethally airborne, inconsequential, or die out completely.

We can hope the latter two are true, but we must be prepared should the virus mutate into a lethally airborne contagion."
SearingTruth

A Future of the Brave

[endrepubs]

test

[searingtruth]

"From what I have seen from other news sources, CBS is under reporting the actual stats for this flu."
IrishWench01


Indeed my friend. There are a lot of discrepancies in suspected and confirmed illness, and I'm worried about the "viral pneumonia" reported in the unfortunate dead. And 'm working on a more user friendly explanation of why we should be unusually afraid of this virus ... :)
ST


"It is the entire circumstance that concerns me, not the small window which peers in upon it."
SearingTruth

A Future of the Brave